A shocking tale of a girl becomes viral and makes rounds to the social media as her story depicts her living in an unimaginable environment for 6 years already. Pictures of her lying on top of a pile of straws with some food around her went viral as it was obvious that she is malnourished due to her 6 years of being confined in a filthy shack.
Meet Zhang Qi, 24 year old, the woman who has been locked up by her own parents for 6 years as they disapproved of her boyfriend. Zhang Qi had called it quits with her boyfriend in 2009 as an order from her parents. Zhang thought that everything will be fine after it, but she was wrong. Her parents had decided to keep her in a filthy shed that became her home for 6 years. Due to this, she was not able to see the world outside for such a long time.
She tried to escape several times but her parents spread word to their village that she was mentally ill and ‘for her own protection’, it is necessary for her to get locked up. A villager even told news stations that her parents had controlled the situation and stopped any Good Samaritan from helping their poor daughter.
“Her parents are powerful people here and everyone was told not to interfere, Everyone knew about the girl in the house. I moved away and only come back to visit occasionally so I don’t care about their threats, and that’s why I was happy to expose these pictures online after the local authorities refused to do anything,”
“Every time I came back for Chinese New Year I went to visit her secretly. On my latest visit though I saw her lying on a pile of straw with a couple of blankets and some food around her and I just decided enough was enough. Whether what they say about her having mental problems is true or not, she is being treated like an animal here and I’m sick of it so I contacted the police, and then posted the images online,” Chow Jen
As of now, there is still no official report regarding the current status of the young woman since her pictures went viral all over the web.
When the temperature drops and chickens lose feathers, many people bundle up their flocks, but others say the garments are more about fashion than function.
Just as our furry friends sometimes need a little extra warmth during the winter months, so do our feathered ones, according to some chicken owners.
While chicken sweaters may seem more of a fashion statement than anything, the people who knit or buy them for their flocks say the knitted garments keep their birds warm during molting season and prevent the chickens from picking at new feathers as they grow in.
"In colder climates like ours it can get quite cold in the fall or the spring when the birds lose their feathers," said Maureen Schmidt, who lives in Kelowna, British Columbia. "Without adequate feathering, they can get quite cold, especially if they drop their old feathers all at once."
Schmidt's mother knitted several warm garments for her daughter's chickens (pictured right).
The sweaters have an opening for the birds' heads and wings, and they button to secure to their bodies.
Schmidt says the sweaters don't restrict her chickens' movements and that the birds adjust to them quickly.
"It usually takes anywhere from a few hours to a day before the chickens adjust completely to the sweater. Once they do they go about their daily scratch and peck as if they grew the sweaters themselves."
Chicken sweaters are also used by many rescue organizations that take in battery hens, which are usually sold for slaughter when they start producing fewer eggs. These birds are often missing a lot of their feathers because of the cramped, stressful conditions they live in.
However, while many people with chickens insist that sweaters keep their flocks healthy and warm, not everyone thinks the knitted garments are necessary.
Other chicken keepers point out that the birds are warm-blooded and able to regulate their own body temperatures by fluffing their feathers, roosting and huddling together for warmth.
They argue that such natural behaviors can be restricted by sweaters. For example, when chickens fluff their feathers, this creates air pockets that keeps warm air close to the bird's body.
"We ought not confuse our comfort level with a chicken's comfort level," writes Kathy Shea Mormino, who maintains the Chicken Chick blog. "In freezing temperatures, the average backyard chicken that is molting furiously would be better served by a retreat to an indoor dog crate in the basement or garage than a sweater."
hen wearing sweaterStill, other keepers say the use of chicken sweaters depends on several factors, including climate, the bird's health and the behavior of the rest of the flock, which sometimes peck at other chickens' exposed skin during molting.
And several animal shelters in cold climates say the tiny sweaters are beneficial to featherless rescued battery hens.
"The hens usually come out of farms quite bald and can be underweight,” said Miranda McPherson, who has knitted sweaters for England’s Little Hen Rescue. "They will soon fatten up and regain their feathers with the right care, but while they are waiting for their feathers to grow back, they can benefit from our knitted jumpers."
You can find knitting patterns and directions to make your own chicken sweater online, or you can purchase them from several Etsy sellers, including Schmidt's Folk and Farm shop.
Not sure if sweaters are right for your flock? Here's more information about how to keep your chickens warm this winter.
Below, check out more photos of fashionable fowl in sweaters.
A 21-year-old man died due to an explosion in a coffee dispensing machine used by a catering house at a function in north-east Delhi’s Sundar Nagari.
He sustained burns in the incident on Sunday and died on Monday, the police said.
The deceased, identified as Rashid, lived with family at Garima Garden in Ghaziabad. According to the police, he was working as a labourer with Golu Tent House in Sundar Nagri.
On Sunday, the tent house was booked for an engagement function at Sundar Nagri F-Block. “Rashid was working on the coffee dispensing machine when the incident occurred at around 8:30 pm,” said a police officer. After initial probe, it was suspected that the machine exploded due to accumulation of pressure.
Three others nearby were also injured. The police were informed, but the injured were taken to Guru Teg Bahadur Hospital before they reached the spot. “Rashid succumbed to burn injuries on Monday morning,” the officer added.
The injured have been identified as Naim, Imran and Guddu, who were invited to the function. The police said Imran’s condition is serious, while Naim and Guddu were discharged after first-aid treatment.
The police have questioned workers of the tent house and found that they were using machines of inferior quality. A case of causing death due to negligence has been filed with Nand Nagri police station. Rashid’s body was handed over to family after post-mortem on Monday. He is survived by his parents, two brothers and four sisters.
The investigating officer of the case told Deccan Herald that the owner of the tent house is likely to be arrested. Rashid had been working with the tent house for the past six months and also worked with other tent houses in north-east Delhi and Ghaziabad.
Astronomers have concluded that 70,000 years ago, a tiny, dim star probably grazed the solar system crossing its distant cloud of comets, called the Oort Cloud.
No other star is known to have ever approached our solar system this close five times closer than the current closest star, Proxima Centauri. On the other hand, that’s still a thousand times further away from the Sun than the dwarf planet Pluto.
Astronomers reached the conclusion after analyzing the current speed and trajectory of a the now-faraway star, nicknamed “Scholz’s star.” The star also has a small companion in the form of a brown dwarf, a type of “failed” star.
Researchers including Eric Mamajek of the University of Rochester in New York reported the findings in a paper published in Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The trajectory suggests, they said, that Scholz’s star passed roughly 8 trillion kilometers, or 5 trillion miles, away. This equals 52,000 Earth-Sun distances away or about four-fifths of a light year.
A light-year is the distance light travels in a year; our closest neighbor star Proxima Centauri is 4.2 light years distant.
The astronomers say in the paper that they are 98 percent sure that Scholz’s star crossed the “outer Oort Cloud” a region at the edge of the solar system filled with trillions of comets a mile or more across. Some of these have occasionally been thrown off track and started orbiting the Sun more closely, becoming what are known as “long-period” comets, though Mamajek said Scholz’s star was probably not a major cause of this sort of event.
The star originally caught Mamajek’s attention during a discussion with co-author Valentin D. Ivanov, from the European Southern Observatory. Scholz’s star had an unusual mix of characteristics including that it was apparently moving directly away from our Solar system, and fast. Most stars as nearby as Scholz’s show more sideways, or “tangential,” motion across the sky, said Mamajek.
Astronomers estimated its speed using the Doppler-shift method, which exploits the change in light rays coming from a moving object. This is analogous to what happens when an ambulance drives quickly away and the siren seems to drop in pitch. From this information, the researchers inferred what the star’s past position must have been.
Until now, the top candidate for the closest flyby of a star to the solar system was the so-called “rogue star” HIP 85605, predicted to come close to our solar system in the next quarter-to-half million years. But Mamajek and his collaborators said it won’t penetrate the Oort Cloud, based on their new calculations.
Mamajek carried out computer simulations of where Scholz’s star could have traveled, working with former University of Rochester undergraduate Scott Barenfeld (now a graduate student at Caltech). Almost all the simulations showed the star passing through the outer Oort cloud. One out of 10 thousand run-throughs brought the star within the “inner” Oort cloud which could have triggered a disastrous “comet shower” hitting Earth and other planets.
Today, Scholz’s star is a small, dim “red dwarf” star in the constellation of Monoceros, about 20 light years away. It would have been too dim to see even when it was “here,” but flare-ups due to magnetic events could have changed that, once in a long while, for minutes or hours at a time, Mamajek said.
The star weighs only an estimated 8 percent as much as our sun, and its companion about 6 percent. The formal designation of the star is “WISE J072003.20-084651.2,” but it has been nicknamed “Scholz’s star” to honor its discoverer, astronomer Ralf-Dieter Scholz of the Leibniz-Institut für Astrophysik Potsdam in Germany, who reported it in 2013.
A linguistics expert believes the man who threatens the West in an Islamic State video purportedly showing the beheading of 21 Coptic Christians was educated in the United States.
But Erick Thomas, a professor of acoustics and dialects at North Carolina State University, says it's unclear whether the mysterious, shrouded figure in the video released on Sunday is from the U.S.
"He clearly spent a significant amount of his childhood in the United States," Thomas told Gretchen Carlson on "The Real Story" Wednesday afternoon. "Whether it was all of his childhood or not, I couldn't say that. I would say probably from the time he began his schooling, he was in the United States, but he was properly exposed to Arabic all along."
Thomas cited the man's use of a "hard G" in two instances: when he says "chopping off" and "fighting us." He also said his pronunciation of the letter "O" in "Rome" might be a clue of his upbringing as well.
"It's a good sign of influence from another language," Thomas said.
As several men in orange jumpsuits are led to a beach where they are believed to have been beheaded, one militant, dressed differently than the others, addresses the camera.
"He clearly spent a significant amount of his childhood in the United States."
- Erick Thomas, professor of acoustics and dialects at North Carolina State University
"All crusaders: safety for you will be only wishes, especially if you are fighting us all together," the militant says. "Therefore we will fight you all together," he said. "The sea you have hidden Sheikh Usama Bin Laden's body in, we swear to Allah we will mix it with your blood."
Also on Wednesday, a top Iraqi diplomat told world leaders that ISIS is harvesting the organs of its victims to fund it murderous operations, the latest charge of barbarity in a list that already includes mass beheadings, burning people alive, crucifying children and throwing people off of buildings.
The shocking new claim was presented by the Iraqi ambassador to the United Nations, who said bodies have turned up in mass graves bearing surgical incisions and missing organs such as kidneys. Ambassador Mohamed Alhakim leveled the charge as he asked the Security Council to investigate whether harvesting and selling the organs of those it executes. The claim followed an unconfirmed report late Tuesday that as many as 45 people captured by the Islamic State in the Anbar Province town of al-Baghdadi had been rounded up and burned alive.
"We have bodies," Alhakim told his international counterparts. "Come and examine them. It is clear they are missing certain parts."
Alhakim, who said a dozen doctors have been executed in Mosul for refusing to participate in organ harvesting, briefed the council on the overall situation in Iraq and accused the Islamic State group of "crimes of genocide" in targeting certain ethnic groups. The outgoing U.N. envoy to Iraq, Nikolay Mladenov, told the council that 790 people were killed in January alone by terrorism and armed conflict.
Mladenov noted the increasing number of reports and allegations that the Islamic State group is using organ harvesting as a financing method, but he said only that "it's very clear that the tactics ISIL is using expand by the day." He used an acronym for the group.
He said Iraq's most pressing goal is to win back the vast territory that the Islamic State has seized in the past year. The Sunni militants seized a third of both Iraq and neighboring Syria and imposed strict Sharia law.
"Especially worrying is the increasing number of reports of revenge attacks committed particularly against members of the Sunni community in areas liberated from ISIL control," Mladenov said.
The identities of the victims who were reportedly burned alive Tuesday in al-Baghdadi are not clear, the local police chief told the BBC. ISIS fighters reportedly captured most of the town last week.
Navy Rear Adm. John Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman, said Wednesday that U.S. authorities were aware of a video purportedly showing the executions, but that officials had not yet verified its authenticity, Fox News' Martha McCallum said on "The O'Reilly Factor."
Al-Baghdadi, which is about 50 miles northwest of Ramadi in Anbar province, is located about five miles from Ain al-Asad air base, where 400 U.S. military personnel are training Iraqi soldiers and Sunni tribesmen to take on ISIS. The base was raided last week by a small band of fighters, in what some experts believe may have been a probe in preparation for a full-scale attack.
The base has been the target of sporadic mortar fire in past weeks, and the jihadist army has been moving forces from its strongholds in Syria to Anbar Province, possibly setting the stage for a major clash with forces on the base that is now the sole bulwark between ISIS and Baghdad.
There are currently nearly 2,600 U.S. forces in Iraq, including about 450 who are training Iraqi troops at three bases across the country, including al-Asad. Forces from other coalition countries conduct the training at the fourth site, in the northern city of Irbil.
But even if ISIS militants close in on the base, taking it would require a massive force, that would present a target for airstrikes, retired Col. Thomas Lynch, a National Defense University fellow, told Fox News.
A Pennsylvania Liquor Control Enforcement officer has found himself on the other side of the state's alcohol laws.
The Citizens Voice newspaper reports that the officer, Michael Rutkowski, 34, of Nanticoke, was found with a blood alcohol level that was over three times the legal limit when he crashed his vehicle last month.
The newspaper writes that Rutkowski, who suffered a head injury in the crash, was transported to Geisinger Wyoming Valley Medical Center, where he registered a blood alcohol level of .278 percent. Pa.'s blood alcohol limit is .08 percent.
He has been charged with driving under the influence and careless driving in the single-vehicle crash, which occurred when his vehicle struck a utility pole, then a tree, head-on, the newspaper reported.
The Times Leader is reporting that the officer has been placed on restricted duty in wake of the incident.
Rutkowski's formal arraignment is set for April 10 in Luzerne County.
